Mobile communications systems continue to be developed to provide increased capacity and expand the number and variety of devices that can be served. Recently, third and fourth generation mobile telecommunication system, such as those based on 3GPP defined UMTS and Long Term Evolution (LTE) architectures have been developed to support more sophisticated communications services to personal computing and communications devices than simple voice and messaging services offered by previous generations of mobile telecommunications systems. For example, with the improved radio interface and enhanced data rates provided by LTE systems, a user may enjoy high data rate applications such as mobile video streaming and mobile video conferencing that would previously only have been available via a fixed line data connection. The demand to deploy third and fourth generation networks is therefore strong and the coverage area of these networks, i.e. geographic locations where access to the network is possible, is expected to increase rapidly. More recently it has been recognised that rather than providing high data rate communications services to certain types of electronic devices, it is also desirable to provide communications services to electronic devices that are simpler and less sophisticated. Expanding the variety of devices that are served beyond those that require high data rate connections also significantly increases the number of devices that may potentially be served and therefore the number of possible revenue streams for telecommunications systems providers. Machine type communication devices provide an example of these new devices which may be served. MTC devices may be semi-autonomous and autonomous wireless communication devices which may communicate small amounts of data on a relatively infrequent basis. Some examples include so-called smart meters which, for example, are located in house of a customer of a utility provider and periodically transmit information back to a central MTC server relating to the customer's consumption of a utility such as gas, water, electricity and so on.